The fine art of werewolfing
by Baeraad
Summary: What do you do if you're forced to run a pack without the support of the Garou Nation? Well, first of all you need a caern of your own... even if it the only availeble one has a Nephandus sitting on it...


_DISCLAIMER: _Werewolf: the Apocalypse _and all aspects of its cosmology, especially the part that says that says that technology is evil, is the property of White Wolf Publishing and definitely not, I repeat _not_, me… though if it was, I'd probably try to deny it anyway. All characters featured within this story (such as they are) are, however, mine._

_Laureril suggested, in the brief correspondence that followed her review of another one of my stories, that I write a story about Ronin werewolves battling an evil mage. This is the result. I'm not sure it's one of my better works – the characters are a tad bit one-dimensional, for one thing – but I had a surprising amount of fun writing it. If you like it, credit her for the idea; if you don't, blame me for making a mess of a perfectly good concept. =]_

---

The house was lying kind of by itself, at the end of a long gravel road and in the thick of some woods, but other than that, it looked as innocent as you'd like. Red-painted walls, a tiled chimney, you name it. Even the lawn was well tended.

  Actually, it looked kind of _too_ nice and innocent, you know? It almost made you want to gag at the pure perfection of it. Real houses aren't supposed to look like that. Real houses are supposed to have some scrapes in the paint at the spot the owner leaned a ladder against once, or some weed in the garden, or… well, something. Something that made you feel it was reality, and not some commercial.

  I, Steve and Valerie lay hidden behind a lovingly tended bush just outside the pink picket fence. We probably weren't hiding very well. I was fairly sure that parts of us, elbows and stuff, was sticking out from behind the bush. But, hey, we were new at this. No one had bothered to _teach_ us how to sneak.

  Besides, the chick in the house was bound to notice us in a moment. You know, what with us storming in and throwing her out, and all.

  "You're _sure_ about this?" Valerie said. "This isn't really what I imagined an evil witch's house to look like, you know."

  Valerie's Spanish or something. Or her grandparents were, before they moved here. Isn't there a word for people like her? Espanic, Hispanic… Well, never mind. The result of it is that she's got dark skin, curly black hair, and a Latino temperament you could light a bonfire with. She's also hot as hell, with a figure to die for. Not that she'd ever give _me_ the time of day. Not even if there _wasn't_ a slim chance that I'd knock her up with something with sharp claws that'd tear her apart when it was born.

  Which there would be. Or so I've been told. I mean, it's not really like I'm planning on putting it to the test. Even if I _did_ have a shot at Valerie. Which, as previously mentioned, I don't. Anyway…

  Steve shrugged miserably.

  "It smells wyrmy," he said morosely. "The whole place. And when the lady who lives there comes out, it starts smelling even worse."

  Now, as large people go, I'm not really one to judge. _Everyone's_ a tall bastard as far as I'm concerned. But Steve is tall even for a tall bastard, and broad, too. Steve _hulks_. He _looms_. When he walks, the ground shakes. And he's permanently gloomy, because he lives in a world full of small, fragile things, and he knows that it's just a matter of time before he breaks something and people get mad at him. Again.

  "There's some sort of altar thing in the back yard," I said. "I mean, if that helps. And it smells like old blood back there."

  "_Smells_!" Valerie said and managed to load the single word with disgust that should rightly have taken a couple of sentences to get out. "It _smells_ wyrmy. It _smells_ like old blood. Do you two ever _think_, or do you just _smell_ your way through life?"

  Steve just sighed. That left it to me to put the situation back on track, but I was kind of used to that by now. Running with a pack wasn't really what I had imagined it to be. Or, well, it wouldn't have been if I had ever imagined what running with a pack would be. Which would be kind of hard, to be honest, because up to a few months back, packs were something that rats and dogs and stuff ran in.

  That was before I found out that I was 'stuff'. That can mess a guy up, you know, finding out that sort of thing.

---

I haven't introduced myself yet, have I? Oooops. Name's Hank. I'm your average, normal guy. No, really, I am.

  I mean, I've got a dad and three sisters. I've got emotional scars from high school, tons of bad dating experiences, a very rare few _good_ dating experiences to make me want to keep trying, and complex for my height (I'm five foot three – well, most of the time, I am) which makes me run my mouth too much. All average, normal stuff. I've got a job as a bank clerk, for crying out loud. How much more boring, ordinary, run-of-the-mill can you get?

  Except for the wolf stuff. The wolf stuff might just be a _tad_ bit weird, I'll give you that. I mean, you don't expect it. _I_ didn't expect it. I don't think that guy in the bar who tripped me when I walked past and called me 'shorty' expected it either. At least he seemed kind of surprised when he was chased down the street by a seven-foot gorilla-wolf-bear crossbreed who was wearing the rags that were left of my clothes.

  Hey, I didn't hurt him, okay? I _wanted_ to, right then, but he was a fast runner, and it's _tricky_ getting the hang of four legs when you've walked around on two all your life.

  So there I was, standing on a street half-naked in the middle of the night, and I knew that for five minutes or so, I had been something that had no business existing outside of a low-budget monster movie. How do you get back to your normal life after that?

  You want to know the freaky part? (the _really_ freaky part; I think we've already covered the _normal_ freaky part, right?) Here it is: it's _easy_ getting back to your normal life after that. You walk around in a daze for a few days, and then your brain just kind of assimilates it. I turned into a monster. Yeah, okay. Doesn't mean you don't need to pay the rent, so you're going to have to mosey back to work on Monday. Doesn't mean you don't get bored as hell from the grind mill and want to take a beer with the guys after work to unwind. You sort of… adjust.

  Not that that means you stop thinking about it. Hell, no. You crank your brain trying to figure out just what the heck went down that night, and if you're _really_ desperate for answers, you go to the library and read up on werewolves. Only nothing you find there makes sense, because it was a freaking _half_ moon when it happened, and you weren't bitten by anything hairy just before.

  And then the Nation finds you.

  You know about the Nation? No? That's good. They don't really like it when the mundanes know about them. _Why_ I'm not exactly clear on. I mean, if you ask them, they'll tell you that if people knew about them, they'd kill them, because people are stupid, ignorant apes and they kill everything they don't understand, bla, bla, bla. Except they'll _also_ tell you, 'oh yeah, we could exterminate the humans in a jiffy, maybe we should at that, they're really a bunch of useless fucks, but we're so noble that we're not going to, and just while we're at it, we're going to save them from the forces of evil who're trying to destroy the world, not that they'll _thank_ us or anything, the idiots don't even know the forces of evil _exist_, can't see beyond their noses, really'.

  Then you point out that it's kind of hard for the humans – no, screw that, the _mundanes_; I'm as human as anyone, I'm just human _with some quirks _– to thank the Nation _or_ to notice the forces of evil, when the Nation is actively hiding their own existence _and_ the existence of the forces of evil from them.

  Well, _I_ pointed that out, anyway. I mean, come on! Can you say 'circular reasoning'? Because people are ignorant, we have to make sure they never learn anything?

  That wasn't popular. Me pointing it out, I mean. There was a lot of yelling and screaming, and then there was a lot of punching and clawing, and then there was a big foot in my ass and a 'and stay out, heretic!' and the door to the Nation slamming shut behind me.

  Well, screw'em. At least I found some buddies, even if they're not really the kind of buddies I tend to make. Steve and Valerie were kicked out too, apparently. We knew each other from the boot-camp place we'd been in, so when we bumped into each other a while after that, we kind of figured out that we were three misfits and we might as well stick together. So we went and formed a pack.

  You know how freaking _complicated _it is, forming a pack? There's a bunch of things you have to do, and between the three of us we could only scrape together a tiny bit of info on each. Find a totem – that's a big one. But we're not sure how to do that. I mean, flipping over to the Other Side or whatever it's called is easy enough, but the Other Side is, like, _big_! How do you find a totem in all that space? What does a totem look like, anyway? Is it green, or what?

  Another thing a pack needs is a holy place to work from. The boot-camp was at a holy place, so we all kind of knew what one was supposed to feel like. It wasn't that tricky, finding holy places. It was trickier finding a holy place where someone hadn't already parked his butt. And I'm not just talking about the Nation. Let me tell you, the world is a _freaky_ place when you start poking around in the right corners! Everyone and their granny want to have a holy place, and they're not sharing, either.

  Okay, so I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that we're three people who can turn into big-ass monsters. If three big-ass monsters want a holy place, they get themselves a holy place, right? Well, you have a point there, definitely, but see, we figured that those weird people we ran into hadn't done anything to deserve us waltzing in and stealing their holy places. Okay, the guy who had covered _his_ holy place with high-tech booby traps that damn nearly killed us all might be a borderline case, but still, private property is private property, right?

  Then, one night, when we sat around moping, Valerie came up with this idea.

  "What about the Wyrm?" she said.

   That wasn't really what me and Steve wanted to hear. I mean, we figured we had plenty of problems without being reminded of the freaking Wyrm. The Wyrm is kind of like the Devil, only the Wyrm is real. _Really_ real, as in, if you go to the right place on the Other Side, you find this _huge_ cave that stretches from one horizon to another, and from the cavern roof – which would get lost among the clouds, if there were clouds in that place – there's these stalactites the size of Mount Everest hanging down to you, and the same thing in reverse on the floor… and if you have enough imagination, you realise that that enormous, reddish, slimy thing on the far side of those mountains is someone's tongue.

  The Wyrm is real. It's also really, _really_ big. And it wants to eat the world. Don't ask me why. Maybe it's feeling peckish and the world is the only thing big enough to even be noticeable in its gut.

  "What about it?" Steve said. He was still moping. He's _good_ at moping.

  "Well, there are people who worship it and stuff," Valerie said. "And they use cairns, right?"

  'Cairn' is fancy Nation talk for 'holy place'. Just FYI.

  "Sure," I said. "There are all sorts of things working for the Wyrm. There's even some kind of people-hating version of the Nation running around." I considered that for a moment. "The Nation, but liking people even _less_. Can we all take a minute and marvel at the concept here? I think I need a minute. Don't you need a minute, Steve?"

  Steve sighed.

  "Knew I could count on you," I said and patted him on the shoulder.

  "What I'm _saying_," Valerie said with a tone that sort of suggested that her patience was running out, like, _fast_, "is that we could track down a cairn that's held by Wyrm-worshippers, and then we could take it. I mean, they want to fucking _end the world_. In my book, that means that they have lost certain fundamental rights."

  "Like owning property?" Steve said absently.

  Valerie smiled. She was all human at the time, not the least bit wolfy, but I _still_ thought her teeth were sharper than usual. It was that kind of smile.

  "Like drawing breath," she said.

  "Okay," I said. "Yeah. Sure. I get your plan, Val. Track down a cairn that's held by Wyrm-worshippers, then take it. Well, why not? I just see two teeny-tiny problems here."

  "Do you?" Valerie said. Being the intuitive, quick-on-my-feet guy I am, I understood that those words said with that expression on her face suggested that she didn't think I ought to see two teeny-tiny problems there. In fact, being _really_ intuitive and quick on my feet, I understood that if the problems I saw weren't really _good_ problems, I might have some more immediate problems of my own, of the kind that people get when they bug Valerie.

  "Well," I said, "there's the tracking part, and there's the taking part. I think those might be a little tricky." I grinned. "But on the upside, I think the _rest_ of the plan is one hundred percent doable."

  Valerie's face got a little redder, and I went to stand behind Steve for a bit. Steve is handy like that. There's so much of him to stand behind when Valerie's on the warpath.

  "Okay," she said, glaring, "so finding a cairn like that's going to take a little while. So what? Is anyone here doing anything special?"

  "I'm having my daughter over this weekend," Steve said. The fact that he said so without the slightest hint of enthusiasm should not be interpreted as him being a bad father. Not necessarily, I mean. I've never really seen him with his kid, so I don't know. I just know that Steve's _never_ enthusiastic, about _anything_. Possibly he was jumping up and down inside over the prospect of quality time with his little girl. It's important to think the best of people. "Otherwise I'm free."

  "Okay, so you can put in a few hours after work every day this week," Valerie said. "Hank…"

  "I guess it can't hurt," I said. Actually, I was thinking that it could hurt. It could hurt my cheerful disposition to have to run around looking for Wyrm-infested holy places. I didn't think it'd do me much good to say as much, though. "I don't have time this Friday, though. I've got a date."

  Valerie winced.

  "Fine," she said. "But you have to work the weekend instead."

  "Oh, I can't then either," I said. "Remember that date? Well, she and I are going to spend this weekend in bed."

  Valerie didn't say anything. She just looked at me.

  "Hey, I can _dream_," I said.

  "Dream on," Valerie said flatly. "But in the oh-so-unlikely case that you don't even manage to score a kiss goodnight, you're working this weekend."

---

I did work that weekend, as it happens. Oh, well.

  I didn't find anything much, though. Not of the right sort, anyway. I mean, holy places, check. Lots of holy places. They're not that hard to find, when you know what you're looking for. They make the hairs in the back of your neck rise just _so_, and you get this mushy all-is-right-with-the-world feeling. Most of the ones I found were the Nation's, though. And that was no good, because a) while the Nation is a bunch of assholes, they're not, like, _evil_, and so are entitled to not having people steal stuff from them, and b) they can do everything I, Steve and Valerie can do, and they have done it for longer and gotten better at it, so, basically, no chance to drive them out of anywhere when they want to stay.

  Meanwhile, Valerie was looking in her own way. She's a reporter at the _Watcher_, which is a monthly magazine that reports… er… bullshit. UFO sightings, Bigfoot, whatever. Now, you might say that I, being a werewolf and all, shouldn't call what the _Watcher_ prints bullshit, what with glass houses and stones and all. Well, look at it this way; I'm a werewolf, and _I_ call what that rag prints bullshit. All right?

  But Valerie's got some perks that me and Steve don't, working there. Mainly, no one notices when she comes and goes as long as her stories get written on time. For that matter, she can research those stories _and_ track down holy places at the same time, because holy places are _freaky_ places, and the _Watcher_ is big on all things freaky.

  She didn't have any more luck than I did, though. It was Steve who found the place for us. Heck knows how he managed, because it's _miles_ outside of town, out in the woods, and I can't figure out why he went there (I asked him; that got me a shrug and a sigh. Got to hand it to Steve, at least he's consistent). Still, he did find it, and when he did he almost passed out from the Wyrm-reek of it.

  Don't ask me to explain that one, okay? Different werewolves can do different stuff. There are _some_ things we can all do, like turn into monsters and flip over to the Other Side, but then there's heck of a lot of other things that's more like personal talents. Steve happens to be able to smell it when he's near someone or something that the Wyrm's been meddling with. I can't do that, so I can't tell you what it's like. The one time I asked Steve _how_ Wyrm-reek smelled, he thought for two minutes straight and then said 'bad'. Sometimes I despair of him, I tell you.

  So that's why me, Steve and Valerie were sitting behind a bush and spying on a nauseatingly pleasant house. Just thought you might like to know.

  "If we run in there all hairy and clawy and give some perfectly innocent old lady a heart-attack," Valerie said ominously, "you're going to be in a world of hurt, Stevie-boy."

  Now, when Valerie talks to me like that, I start looking for escape routes. Got to hand it to Steve, though, he kept his cool. In fact, he barely seemed to notice her mood. He just gave her a look of patient misery.

  "She's not old," he said. "And she's not innocent. She's with the Wyrm."

  "Fine. Fine." Valerie threw up her hands. "I'll take your word for it, God knows _why_. Anyone put any thought into how we're going to do this?"

  I had to admit that I hadn't really thought about that. But come on, cut me some slack here. I'm highly trained to sit in a window at the bank and help people to put their money in and prevent them from taking their money out – without lots and lots of fuzz, at least. Fighting evil witches wasn't really what you'd call my area of expertise.

  "We could try just telling her to get out," I said. "Starting slow, you know? I mean, if you were an evil witch, which I of course in no way suggests you are, despite the fact that you cold-heartedly made me drive around all weekend looking for holy places, when I _could_ have been lying in bed, eating cookies and watching sitcom reruns…" I paused. "You know, I kind of _do_ want to suggest that you're an evil witch…"

  "Get to the point," Valerie said. "_Now_."

  "If you were this chick," I said, "and three werewolves wanted you to get out of your house, wouldn't you get out of your house?"

  Valerie considered that.

  "Maybe," she said, "but on the other hand, I might just turn all three of us into toads."

  "Would that work?" I said. I hadn't thought about that possibility. My nickname in high school had been 'Toad'. I had hated it then, and I hated the idea of it becoming the literal truth now. "I mean, we're shapeshifters, right? Couldn't we just shift our shapes back to human?"

  "Hmm. Might be." Valerie shrugged. "But I don't see why we can't just kill her?"

  "Er… because killing people is… you know… wrong…?" I suggested.

  "Yeah, but she's _evil_," Valerie said. "Allied with the world-destroying forces of darkness, and all that jazz. She's bound to be up to all _sorts_ of nastiness out here where no one can see. Sacrificing babies at that altar or whatever."

  Steve scowled. As a father, he probably had some problems with the idea of babies being sacrificed. I realised that I was on the verge of being out-voted on the 'let's not kill someone' issue unless I started talking fast. Luckily, talking fast is one of my trademarks.

  "Well, first of all," I said, "we only have Steve's nose to tell us that she's evil, and only the Nation's word that what Steve's nose is, in fact, telling us is that she's evil. For all we know, that smell could just mean that she doesn't recycle. Second, if we kill her, the police might get curious. Okay, sure, I don't think we'll get suspected for the murder of someone who was obviously ripped to confetti by some big, savage beast, but still, it'd be a hassle."

  "Okay, okay." Valerie sighed. "We'll try to talk to her. But if that doesn't work, I'm turning her into a jigsaw puzzle."

  "Is it just me," I said, as we got up from behind the bush and marched down the gravel path to the front door, "or are you disturbingly enthusiastic about the prospect of taking the life of your fellow human beings?"

  Valerie scowled.

  "I put up with damn stupid people all day long," she said, "every day of my life, and I can't give a single one of them the trashing they deserve. Once, just _once_, I'd like a chance to deliver a good mauling that no one can say wasn't justified."

  "It'll happen to you, Val," I said and patted her comfortingly on the arm. "Just keep the dream alive."

  The look Valerie gave me made me withdraw my hand. Very quickly indeed.

  We reached the door. After a moment's hesitation and a few confused looks and shrugs exchanged between each other, I knocked. It felt pretty weird knocking on the door to an evil witch's house. But the only other idea that came to mind, knocking the door _down_ and storming in, felt even weirder. That's the problem with evil witches. There aren't any rules for how you're supposed to interact with them.

  Or maybe there are. Heck, I don't know. Maybe it's only socially acceptable to violently decapitate them after having inquired as to the health of their mothers, or something.

  Eventually, the door was opened by a lady in her thirties. She was blonde, broad-shouldered and very good-looking, if you liked the type. I, for one, didn't. It wasn't exactly her face I didn't like, though. It was _kind_ of her clothes – they were casual, but they were the kind of casual that takes one hell of a lot of work, if you see what I mean. They _dazzled_ you with their casualness. 'Look how relaxed and comfortable I am!' they yelled. 'Look how I don't need to dress up in order to be much sexier than you'll ever be! Don't you wish you could be like me?'

  And she looked at the three of us with a look that was… well, I think the best word is 'haughty'. Like we were the most ridiculous thing in the world, and we didn't even know it.

  Yeah, you can say I took an instant dislike to her. I don't know, maybe it's got to do with personal traumas and stuff. She looked a lot like the kind of girls in high school who had shot me down every time I even got within ten feet of them.

  "Yes?" she said. Politely enough, I guess – it was just that that smug little smile didn't leave her face. It made me want to Change on the spot. Which was probably why I said:

  "Listen up, lady! We're werewolves! Get the hell out of here right now, or we'll do what werewolves do to witches!" which probably wasn't the best thing to say in the circumstances, but hey – it was direct and to the point, you've got to give me that.

  The witch stared at me for a moment, looking like she couldn't believe her ears. Then she laughed. It wasn't a big HA HA HA laugh, more like a giggle.

  "I see," she said, the corners of her mouth still twitching. "Did Rolf send you?"

  "Who?" I said before I could stop myself.

  "No one sent us," Valerie snapped. "We need a cairn, so we're taking yours, you Wyrm-worshipping bitch! You got a problem with that, just say so!"

  When Valerie asks most people if they've got a problem, they fall over themselves in their hurry to express how unproblematic their lives are. Credit where credit's due, though, the old girl didn't even flinch.

  "Not that I like to resort to playground logic," she said, "but I had it first. You're honestly a free entity?"

  "Well, we're kind of _three_ free entities," I said. "But pretty much, yeah."

  The witch put a finger to her lip and took a good, long look at us.

  "How interesting," she said. "How about you come inside and we can talk about it. Maybe we could work something out."

  We looked at each other. That is, first me and Steve looked left to Valerie, and then me and Valerie looked right to Steve. It's kind of hard to look at each other all at once when you're standing in a line, but when you're a pack, these things come kind of naturally, for some reason.

  "Why not?" Steve said.

  "Because we don't negotiate with fucking witches?" Valerie offered.

  "But don't we?" I said. "Strictly speaking, I mean? We haven't really run into one before. Do we really have a firm policy vis-à-vis practitioners of witchcraft?"

  Valerie looked a bit uncertain, which is a pretty damn rare thing, let me tell you.

  "The Nation guys said to never, ever to make any kind of deals with witches," she said. "Because then this leads to that and that leads to this, and before you know it, you've bartered your soul away."

  "Well, yeah," I said, because I'd been told just about the same thing. "But the Nation guys _also_ said, 'Valerie, don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out'."

  Valerie glared.

  "I'm just saying," I said, "the Nation guys said a whole lot of dumb stuff. Okay, they don't like witches, but they don't really like _us_, either."

  "He's got a point," Steve said.

  Valerie made an ugly face, which is no mean feat when you've got a face like Valerie's. She didn't say I _didn't_ have a point, though. The witch seemed to get what that meant, because she smiled wider.

  "Come on in, then," she said. "My name's Nicole, by the way."

  "I'm Hank," I said when we stepped into the foyer. It looked a lot like the rest of the house – and like Nicole herself, for that matter. So nice and wholesome that it made you gag. "The gloomy one's Steve and the angry one's Valerie."

  "Nice to meet you," Nicole said. "Would you like some coffee?"

---

There might be some kind of rules for how werewolf-witch interaction's supposed to go. If there is, I don't think coffee is part of it. It's probably more along the lines of _Die in the name of Gaia, witch_, or possibly _Die in the… ribbit ribbit ribbit_, depending on who manages to get the upper hand. Still, half an hour later the three of us were sitting in Nicole's pricey-yet-cosy dining room, drinking some pretty awesome cappuccinos and telling her our story, such as it was.

  Okay, so we're not very good at werewolf stuff. It's harder than it looks, I'm telling you!

  "I must admit that I'm fascinated by all this," Nicole said. "I wasn't aware that there were any werewolf factions aside from the Nation and the Dancers."

  "I don't think we're a proper _faction_, exactly…" Steve mumbled.

  "Dancers?" I said.

  "Black Spiral Dancers," Valerie said. "You know, those guys who hate people even more than the Nation does?"

  "Oh, them."

  "They said I was one," Steve said gloomily.

  All three of us looked at him curiously.

  "_You're_ a Black Spiral Dancer?" Valerie said. "But you don't hate people." She considered. "Life in general, possibly, but not people."

  Steve shrugged.

  "They said I was one, though. The Nation. That's why they kicked me out."

  "Just for the record," I said, "do you feel a burning desire to, in no particular order, rape, maim and kill everyone in this room for the greater glory of the Wyrm?"

  Steve gave me a miserable look.

  "Hey, I happen to think it's a valid question!" I insisted. "I mean, this is vital information to me in the most literal possible way!"

  "They said that the Wyrm was going to destroy the world unless we fought it," Steve said. "So I said 'Why bother? It's just going to win anyway'. Then they said that I must be an infiltrator sent there to spread fear and despair among the troops." He sighed. "They chased me all the way to the city limits."

  "You're wrong, though," Nicole said matter-of-factly. "Sure, the Wyrm is going to wipe out humanity, and probably all other higher life forms at the same time, but if it's going to destroy the entire universe, the very _substance_ of the world… well, it's going to need our help with that."

  There was a moment of silence after that statement. I mean, it was kind of hard to think of anything to say to that, you know? Doom-and-gloom people who walk around saying that the world is coming to an end is common enough, but they don't usually top that off by saying that we'd all better help so that it'll be a _proper_ end of the world.

  "And we should help it… why?" Valerie said. "I mean, we're talking about the goddamn _Armageddon_ here, right? End of days? Time of judgement? Everyone, including us, dying?"

  "Well, from a purely selfish perspective," Nicole said, smiling somewhat condescendingly, "preventing the Apocalypse is certainly the sensible thing to do. But I think we all pride ourselves on a bit more ethics than that, don't we?"

  Cue another moment of silence.

  "Excuse me," I said. "I think I may be a tad bit lost here, sorry to say. Are you in fact arguing the point that _not_ aiding and abetting in the murder of the entire human race, and any other race that might be in the vicinity, is _selfish_?"

  "Absolutely," Nicole said immediately. "I know it sounds weird, but think about it from a big perspective for a moment. Everything is born, lives, and, eventually, dies. Right? Now, the universe was born, and it has lived for a very long time. Now it's time for it to die."

  "Er… says _who_, exactly…?" Steve said slowly.

  "Says the natural order of things," Nicole said. "Sure, we might be able to keep the world running for a little longer, but that would be like keeping someone alive with respirators and intravenous feeding long after her body's turned into a motionless sack of meat and her mind has declined into that of a vegetable. Imagine keeping your mother alive like that, just because you can't bear the thought of her dying? Would that be an act of kindness or selfishness?"

  "My mom ran off with a mountain wolf when I was three," I said. "Or so my dad told me, when I got home from that boot camp place and said, 'Dad, it turns out that I'm a werewolf, so either you or mom must be one. Fess up.' So I'm not exactly sure about anything dealing with mothers. Sorry."

  "Really?" Valerie said. "A wolf? That's… really disturbing."

  "_You_ think it's disturbing?" I said. "Just imagine how my dad felt about getting ditched for a guy who licks his balls in public."

  "As I was saying," Nicole said patiently, "Gaia is all of our mother, and we owe her to let her go out with dignity."

  Gaia is the living soul of the universe, according to the Nation's dogma. Apparently, the Greeks nicked the name from them and strapped it onto one of their own goddesses. Given the temper of werewolves in general, and knowing how seriously they take their religion – and, for that matter, everything else – it's really kind of surprising that there are any Greeks left. Maybe werewolves were a bit more mellow five thousand years ago.

  "Okay…" I said slowly. "Makes sense. Kind of. From a certain perspective. But why does the universe has to die right _now_? I mean, it's like fifteen billion years old at the moment, or whatever it was. If it's hung on that long, can't it wait until humanity has gone extinct? I mean, that should take, what, a measly ten million years or something at most…"

  Nicole gave me a funny look. Didn't bother me, though. I'm used to beautiful women giving me funny looks. I talk even more and make even less sense around them, see, so I guess I can't blame them for sometimes wondering what asylum I've escaped from.

  "Because it's now that the world has become so irreparably damaged that it's not fit to live in anymore," she said.

  The three of us considered that for a moment.

  "I've been doing pretty well so far," Valerie then said.

  "I can personally vouch for it being perfectly good for living twenty-two years in," I said. "Can't say much for certain otherwise, but hey, twenty-two years isn't to be sneezed at."

  "But what about the forests being cut down?" Nicole said. She was talking very carefully, like she was addressing a bunch of imbeciles and had decided to be patient and understanding with them. "What about the rivers being poisoned? What about the animals going extinct? The last few hundred years, everything has been going to hell. Surely you can see that?"

  "Oh," Valerie said. "Pollution and stuff. Yeah, the Nation yapped a lot about that, too."

  "Well, pollution does kind of suck," I said. "No argument there. We're dead set against it, aren't we, guys?"

  "I recycle," Steve offered. "And I give twenty-five dollars a month to Greenpeace."

  Valerie glanced at him.

  "Why?" she said. "I thought everything was hopeless."

  Steve just shrugged.

  "But in that case…" Nicole said.

  "Yeah, but on the _other_ hand," I said, "there's been a whole lot of improvements in the last few hundred years, too. Democracy is in. War is out. And the overwhelming majority of people actually get something to eat once a day, which is always nice." I grinned. "Besides, there's lots of nifty stuff around that didn't used to exist. I mean, we've got the Internet, penicillin, air planes, sitcom reruns, birth control…"

  "Wait. Stop." Nicole slowly raised her hand. "You're _for_ birth control?"

  The three of us looked at each other again, according to more or less the same technique I've detailed previously in this riveting tale.

  "Uhm… yes?" Valerie said.

  "Pretty much," I admitted.

  "Well, unless you _want_ a kid…" Steve said.

  Nicole seemed to be struggling with a confusing concept.

  "And you're _sure_ you're werewolves?" she said.

  "I don't think we're very good at it," Steve said glumly. "If that helps."

  "What," I said, "are all werewolves devoted Catholics or something? Because if they are, I don't think they've taken a good enough look at the part about loving your neighbour."

  "It's just," Nicole said, perplexed, "that even the rare ones who like technology in general think that sex without pregnancy is extremely unnatural. It doesn't work that way for wolves, so it shouldn't work that way for anyone else either, that kind of thing."

  "Tell me about it," Valerie growled. "They told me that I had to have at least ten children, because only one kid in ten who has a werewolf parent turns out to be a werewolf. Then I said that as far as I was concerned, _one _would be too many. Then they told me to 'get back to your sterile, unnatural city life, Weaver-corrupted bitch.'"

  "Yeah, they explained to me about that part too," I admitted.

  "Yeah?" Valerie said. "What did you say?"

  "That I was up for it if the ladies were," I said matter-of-factly.

  Valerie snorted.

  "Yeah. You _would_ say that."

  "Hey, I'm not saying they weren't out of line trying to make big, life-altering decisions for you," I said. "Big 'you go, girl' for standing up to them! Besides, as far as birth control goes, most people feel ready to screw way earlier than they feel ready to have kids, right? So really, it's _not_ having birth control that's unnatural."

  "Hank," Valerie growled, "you're starting to make me think you might not be a total idiot. Quit that."

  "Well, damn." Nicole gracefully got up from the table and walked over to a window with slow steps. "The 'mercy killing' approach usually works really well with werewolves. Just my luck to run into the only pack in the worldthat it doesn't work on."

  "I _kind_ of agreed with you," Steve offered. "About the world being a mess and all."

  Nicole turned around and smiled at him.

  "Thanks," she said. "When I was eighteen, I spent _hours_ practicing it in front of the mirror." She frowned. "Damn, I should have gone with the 'slander' approach. I'd have knocked your socks off with the 'slander' approach, I'm telling you."

  "What's the 'slander' approach?" I said.

  "Oh, it's when I explain to you that everything you've been told about the Wyrm is a lie and it's really this innocent, benevolent entity who's been wrongfully attacked by the mean, evil Nation."

  "Yeah, I'd have fallen for that one," Valerie admitted.

  "Me too," I said. "In fact, the reason why we didn't just attack you outright was that we were scared that that was how things really were."

  "What, really?" Nicole blinked, then slapped her forehead. "Aaaarrrgghhh! Do you have any idea how incredibly annoying that is to me?"

  "I can guess," I said. "Well, what's done is done. With considerable regret and the outmost apologies, I find myself forced to give you the sad news that we're not, in fact, going to get corrupted by you. So now what do we do?"

  "Traditionally?" Nicole said. "You Change and rush me, and I try to fend you off for long enough to escape."

  "So either we kill you and get your holy place," Valerie said, "or we chase you off and get your holy place? Hey, nice. Win-win situation."

  Nicole shrugged.

  "Yeah," she said, "but what can you do?"

  "Okay, guys," Valerie said. She got up from her chair and threw it aside. "On three. One."

  "Uhm…" said Steve, who didn't look as happy about the prospect of a massacre as Valerie did.

  "Two!" Valerie snapped.

  "Let's just get it over with," I said. I wasn't feeling too keen about this myself, but I figured Valerie was going to attack no matter what, and if she did that and Nicole beat her, Nicole was going to start on _us_ afterwards, and not only didn't I know what kind of powers a witch might have, but I didn't _want_ to know what kind of powers a witch might have, if you see what I mean. Steve groaned, but when I got up, he got up, too.

  "Three!" Valerie cheered.

  We Changed.

  You know how in the movies, whenever a werewolf turns, well, wolfy, there's a lot of yelling and screaming and howling involved? Well, there's a reason for that. Remember those teenage growth spurts? Remember how that hurt like a bastard? Imagine how it would feel if the growth spurt made you half again as tall as you were to start with, and it all happened in the span of ten seconds.

  Then there's the feeling you get when your nerves are stretched out. I can't really describe what _that_ feels like, because most of you won't have had all your limbs torn off. It only lasts for a moment before your body adjusts, but man oh man, that's one long moment.

  Still, we got through it, and the next moment, three huge, shaggy monsters in the remnants of our clothes stood around the table.

  The next moment after _that_, the floorboards cracked and we fell through, along with the table and four half-empty cups of cappuccino. As you can imagine, this was a bit of a surprise for us, and not an especially nice one, either. In fact, as we fell – it lasted, perhaps, a few seconds, but much like during the Change, those few seconds when we didn't know if we'd land before or after achieving terminal velocity were some pretty damn long seconds – there was a lot of howling, growling, swearing and at least one case of throwing up.

  I refuse to say who threw up, on account of it will make me look bad.

  When we finally _did_ land… well, just having Changed helped in two ways. One, it meant that we were fully-fledged werewolves, which means that a fall of thirty feet or so wasn't enough to actually kill us. Two, seeing as we'd just gone through that excruciating agony that I went on about at some length a moment ago, the _lesser_ excruciating agony of breaking half the bones in your body didn't seem as bad by comparison.

  Not that that made it nice or anything. Just saying, you've got to look at the bright side of things.

  As we were lying on the stone floor in whatever sort of cavern we'd fallen into, trying to get our werewolf bodies to heal up _now_ already, the light from above was blocked out by Nicole's head.

  "Oh, did I forget to mention that?" she shouted cheerily. "This floor is right over the caves, and it's not all that strong. Adding like five hundred pound to it, in one spot, all at once, isn't really a very good idea."

  "I hate her…" Valerie groaned. Mind you, since she was talking through a snout, it was more like 'ayrr errrrrt errrrrr', but you get the idea. Steve and I didn't have any trouble understanding it, so why should I keep _you_ guessing, is what I'm saying.

  I managed to get everything functioning smoothly enough for me to get up. I still ached all over, but at least nothing felt like it was going to break if I moved it. Got to admit it, being a werewolf has some perks.

  "I'd like to make it very clear," I shouted up at Nicole, "that sooner or later, we're going to manage to get out of this hole, and when we do, you'll be very sorry about the fact that we got out of this hole!"

  "Oh, you don't have to worry about that," Nicole said. She didn't seem to have any problems understanding someone talking with a werewolf accent. Maybe you learn stuff like that when you're a witch. "There's a tunnel that ends up over by the lake. I'm sure you'll find it easily enough."

  "Well… well, then you're going to be very sorry about the fact that we found the tunnel that ends up over by the lake!" I shouted.

  "No, I won't," Nicole said.

  "You will!" I insisted. "You will, I tell you! You will!"

  "No, I won't," Nicole said.

  "_Why_ won't you be?" Steve said. He had managed to get healed up, too, and Valerie wasn't far behind.

  "Oh," Nicole said, "because before you've taken three steps, the very large number of killer mutants I keep down in these caves are going to rend you limb from limb. Have a nice day."

  The shadow of her head disappeared from the hole in the ceiling.

  We stood there for a while, looking dumbly up at the circle of light up there. So comforting, so inviting, so extremely out of our reach.

  "Well," I said. "This kind of sucks."

---

Three hours later, we knocked in Nicole's door again. We were back in human shape, but we weren't really the neat and pleasant-looking bunch who had done that the last time, I don't mind telling you. We were bloody, slimy, grimy, gory and dressed in rags. Steve had one arm that at the moment bended the wrong way, because we had figured out the hard way – well, Steve had figured it out the hard way, anyway, by having it happen to him; Valerie and I had figured it out the easy way, also by having it happen to him – that even though werewolf bodies heal wounds, they don't always heal wounds _right_. Valerie had pieces of mutant in her thick hair. As for me, I was severely traumatised and in need of expert psychiatric care. When a two-ton muck monster uses you as a handkerchief it stays with you, let me tell you.

  Please. Don't ask.

  Nicole opened the door. She watched us dispassionately for a moment.

  "Oh _yeah_," she said, facepalming, "_now _I remember. I let Gregory borrow most of my prize mutants last week. I knew that my generous nature was going to get me into trouble one of these days."

  "You…" Valerie gasped. "You… you… you…"

  She advanced into the foyer, and Nicole backed away from her.

  "Now, try to see this from my position," she said reasonably. "It was you who came here and tried to drive me out of my house. Then it was you who were going to kill me. A woman has the right to defend herself."

  "There were like twenty… _things_ down there!" I howled. Actually, that's an unfortunate choice of word, given the givens. What I mean is that I said it with a very loud, very upset, very high-pitched voice. Not that _actually_ howled. I can do that, you know, but that wasn't what I did this time. "We had to _tear them to pieces_ just to get through!"

  "Oh? Killed my pets too, did you?" Nicole said. "We're adding felony to felony here."

  "Yeah, but you stuck us down there with them," Steve rumbled. "We had to do _something_…"

  "I did no such thing," Nicole said firmly. "It was you who made yourself too heavy for the floor. By the way, let's add 'vandalising my property' to the list of things you've done. And what have I done to harm _you_? Nothing!"

  Valerie had Nicole all the way by the wall now. And Nicky was starting to look a bit nervous for the first time. Can't blame her, really. There's the black arts, and then there's big, sharp claws. The black arts are probably cooler, I'm not saying they aren't. But big sharp claws have more of what you might call short-term efficiency, and from the looks of it, Nicole wasn't going to get any term that was anything else than short.

  "I'm going to kill her," Valerie snarled. "I'm not even going to Change before I do it. I'm going to put my normal, human hands around her throat and I'm going to _squeeze_ until she gets blue in the face and her eyes pop out of their sockets."

  "Uhm, Val," I said. "You know I hate to say this…"

  "Then don't say it," Valerie said.

  "But the thing is," I said, "she's got a _point_."

  "What?" Valerie said. "No she doesn't."

  "Val," I said, "I am covered in mutant snot. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would please me more than to see someone get brutally punished for that fact. But the fact of the matter is, the only reason we ended up down there in the first place was because we tried to kill her. If we hadn't tried to kill her, we wouldn't have ended up down there. I mean, when you think about it, it was self-defence."

  "No, it's… She… We…" Valerie struggled mightily to avoid seeing the obvious wisdom in my words, but in the end, she could not resist my enormous intelligence, wit and insight. For once, I actually felt sorry about that. I really _would_ have loved to see Valerie go crazy on Nicole. It's a burden to always be right, I tell you. "But she wants to _destroy_ the _world_!"

  "Yeah," I said, "but there's people out there who thinks that everyone who's not white, male, Christian and straight should be a second-class citizen, but it's still not okay to kill _them _until you can prove that they have _treated _those people like second-class citizens. It's a bitch, but there you have it. Wanting's not a crime. Doing's a crime, but she hasn't really _done_ anything that we've seen."

  "Listen to the voice of reason," Nicole said.

  "Can it," Valerie growled at her. She turned to glare at me. "So what, exactly, do you propose we do?"

---

"And stay out, witch!" Valerie yelled.

  Nicole glared up at her from halfway down the driveway. When Steve tosses someone, they fly a long way.

  I slammed the door shut and grinned at the other two.

  "See?" I said. "Didn't that make you feel all good inside? Like there might actually be justice in the world despite everything?"

  "Got some symmetry to it, yeah," Valerie said, looking smug.

  "She'll just have the police run us out of here, though," Steve said glumly. "It's still her property…"

  "If she wants to do that," Valerie said, "she'd better think of some way to explain the mutated corpses under the house. And God knows what else she's got stashed away around here that she won't want anyone to find. She can't blame _everything_ on us."

  "Besides," I said, "say she does that. Say she gets us thrown in prison. How long would it take us to get out of there? And then we'd be knocking at her door again. Only that time, I'd like to vote that we knock _down_ her door and proceeds to spread her halfway over the county, because there _is_ such a thing as a limit to how charitable you can be to evil witches."

  "She'll think of something, you'll see," Steve said with kind of twisted satisfaction. Honestly, sometimes I think that there are people who can't be happy unless they're unhappy. That sounds like a hassle to me, though. Personally, I can be perfectly happy while I'm happy. That makes things simpler.

  "Be that as it may," I said, nobly choosing to ignore his assaults on my good spirit, "we did it, guys. We've now got a base of operations. We can put a big check on the list of things to do, in the heart-warming knowledge of a job well done. So what's next? How will we proceed in battling the forces of darkness and oppression?"

  "_I _will proceed by finding the bathroom and taking a shower," Valerie said. "And then I'm going to see if that bitch had any clothes in her wardrobe that might fit me. Anyone tries to peek at any point during all that, and I'll neuter him. Just so we're clear."

  She strode off deeper into the house.

  "I bet she's going insane," Steve droned. "I bet that Nicole woman has left all sorts of forces and curses and spirits and stuff in this house that's going to make us go insane and kill each other."

  I looked at Steve. I looked in the direction Valerie had wandered off.

  "You know," I said to the world in general, "somehow I'm not quite convinced that the forces of darkness and oppression have all too much to worry about…"


End file.
